THE THREE KINGDOMS.

WHEN a newspaper dulness has grown to unusual
intensity, it is pretty certain to find relief in a
sudden flow of exciting paragraphs, of which the
happy peculiarity is that while they act as a pleasing
stimulus for the time, they leave behind them no trace
whatever. They have not improperly been called
newspaper dispensations. "Convocation" is the latest
example of the kind. A false alarm that it was to
be allowed to meet for the dispatch of business, has,
for some ten days of the past month, made the
newspapers quite lively, and given to great numbers of
people the same animating terror that a battle, or
murder on a large scale, or news of the approach
of cholera for the dispatch of business, might have
done. In considering what has to be undergone by
the reading community, with hardly a possibility of
escape, when Parliament meets for business
purposes, the mind really sinks overpowered at the
idea of another public debating club sitting in the
same quarter, representing nothing whatever but the
debaters themselves, and these formed exclusively
of a class to whom the remark of Clarendon has
become more and more applicable every year, since
it was first thrown out a couple of hundred years
ago, "Of all mankind none form so bad an estimate
of human affairs as churchmen."'

By churchmen, Clarendon meant priests; just as,
when they talk of the church, priests mean only
themselves. But a laity as well as a clergy is necessary
to constitute a church; and any pretence that
the houses of convocation ever represented it,
without a layman sitting in them, or the power to bind a
layman to accept any one of their canons, is a
ridiculous fraud. – Convocation was an expedient of the
thirteenth century to compel the church to submit
to taxation; and down to the last days of its foolish
existence it was never substantially anything else.
As long as it did anything, it did the work of a
committee of ways and means to the house of commons;
and when Lord Clarendon managed to trip it up at
this work, it had nothing more to do, and fell to
those evil courses notoriously the refuge of the idle.
Its grand peculiarity became bad language. It was
the parliament of billingsgate. When it was at last
found necessary to put a gag upon it, now nearly a
hundred and fifty years ago, its outbreaks of personal
ribaldry and sectarian spite had made it a public
scandal. No wonder people should now be terrified
at the remotest prospect of ungagging so foul a
mouth. Fancy the Bishop of Exeter in one house
and Mr. George Anthony Denison in the other!

Whether Lord Derby ever seriously contemplated
the folly is now hardly worth considering. That he
had been coquetting with the Convocation party
became clear from Mr. Denison's unexpected support
of his claim to the Oxford Chancellorship, of which,
chiefly by that means (for it disarmed the tractarians),
he suddenly possessed himself; but on the
other hand it may readily be supposed that the latest
performances of Exeter's famous bishop, and their
reception by a discriminating public, were of a kind
to unsettle these high church hankerings. That
celebrated prelate has been hard at work during all
the month. He has sat in judgment upon one of his
clergymen, accused of playing father confessor to a
number of young girls in defiance of English decency
even more than of Protestant doctrine, and has
triumphantly acquitted him. He has declared that the
church does not admit of a confessional, though it
may not censure a confessor; and has clamoured for
a prosecution in the Court of Arches, that he may
prove his antagonists to be libellers. He has selected
the church of this quasi-Romanist priest for his own
latest confirmation in his diocese; and to that sacred
office he has proceeded, according to the accounts in
the newspapers which reach us while we write, amid
yells and groans and hissings and hootings from crowds
of well-dressed people. "Inspector Thomas had to send
round two policemen to the other side of the carriage,
towards which there was a great rush, to prevent the
people from opening the door. The bishop had his plain
coat buttoned to the chin." In short, the bishop, in
his plain coat buttoned to the chin, has all the month
been thoroughly enjoying himself. For has not hot
water been his element ever since his name was
Philpotts? He has thriven and grown to his present
bulk on the nourishment of heats and disorders. It
was an abusive pamphlet that lifted him to the
bench; and if we are asked for the bitterest party
pamphlets of the age, we have but to point to his
episcopal charges and pastoral letters. His measure
of the capacity of good in anything has been its
capacity of abusive treatment, and he has encouraged
or discountenanced it accordingly. Under flags and
symbols of peace and good-will, war still has been his
trade. His bitterest inuendos have taken the form of
charitable allowances, and never has he been so hard
upon his adversaries as when professing to intercede
for their forgiveness. The consequence of all which
is, that the diocese by course of time having come quite
naturally to reflect its bishop, Exeter is the most
quarrelsome place in the world; and it exhibits its
worst disturbances in connection with its places of
worship, just as its right reverend father hits heaviest
with his prayers.

Not wholly to this noisy diocese, however, have the
ecclesiastical scandals of the month been confined.
It has furnished us with a highly edifying discussion
of religious equality from the Irish side of the
Channel, in which the principle laid down by the
authorised representative of the Catholic priesthood
in that country is plainly this, that where a government
is Protestant, the rule should be perfect equality
for all churches, and share and share alike in all
church property; but where a government is Catholic,
confiscation of all livings and persecution of all
opinions but its own should be held an imperative
duty. Thus, that Archbishop Whately should be